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A LETTER SAID TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN 
BY COTTON MATHER, SHOWN TO BE A 
MISERABLE FORGERY. 



At a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, held in Boston on Thursday, March 12, 1908, 
. Hon. Samuel A. Green made the following; remarks : — 

Nearly forty years ago, at the meeting of this Society in 
June, 1870 (Proceedings, XI, 828, 329), I had occasion to speak 
of a forged letter which was said to have been written by Cot- 
ton Mather, and supposed to be among the manuscripts in 
this Library. The letter, dated " September ye 15th, 1682," 
was published first in the Easton (Penn.) Argus of April 
28, 1870, and was widely copied into other newspapers. It 
was signed " Cotton Mather," and purported to give the de- 
tails of " a scheme to bagge Penne," on the part of the Colony 
of Massachusetts Bay. In an accompan3ing statement it is 
said that the letter was found by " Mr. Judkins, the Libra- 
rian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in overhauling 
a chest of old papers deposited in the archives of that body by 
the late Robert Greenleaf, of Maiden." 

In the interest of historical truth and in order to give an 
official denial to the story, at that meeting as Librarian I pro- 
nounced the letter a miserable forgery. The name of Mr. 
Judkins was utterly unknown at the Library ; no such chest of 
old papers as is alleged to have been deposited here was ever 
received, and no such person as the one said to have made the 
deposit was known to the members. Evidently the story was 
started for the express purpose to deceive the public and to 
create a prejudice against the early founders of New England. 






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The letter, which was addressed to the Rev. John Higginson, 
of Salem, is as follows : — 

Boston, September ye 15th, 1682. 

To TE AGED AND BELOVED JOHN HiGGINSON. 

There bee now at sea a shippe (for our friend Mr. Esaias Holcroft of 
London did advise me by the last packet that it wolde sail some time in 
August) called ye Welcome, R. Greenaway master, which has aboard 
an hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants called Quakers, with 
W. Penne, who is ye Chief Scampe at ye hedde of them. Ye General 
Court has accordinggely given secret orders to Master Malachi Huxett 
of ye brig Porposse to waylaye ye said Welcome slylie as near ye 
coast of Codde as may be and make captive ye said Penne and his un- 
godlie crew so that ye Lord may be glorified and not mocked on ye soil 
of this new countrie with ye heathen worshippe of these people. Much 
spoyle can be made by selling ye whole lotte to Barbadoes, where slaves 
fetch' goode prices in rumme and sugar and we shall not only do 
ye Lord great service by punishing ye wicked but we shall make 
great gayne for his ministers and people. Master Huxett feels hopeful 
and I will set down the news he brings when his shippe comes back. 
Yours in ye bowells of Christ. 

Cotton Mather. 

This spurious production appears periodically in the public 
prints, and often has been exposed as a miserable forgery, but 
it will not dozvn. Like a planet it seems to have an orbit of 
its own in which it moves, and at regular intervals is printed 
in the newspapers. At the time of its date Mather was only 
nineteen years old, which fact alone would be presumptive 
evidence that he was not connected with any such piratical 
scheme. There are other ear-marks in the letter which tell 
against its authenticity. The word " scampe " was not in use 
two hundred years ago, ajfrd Mather would never have used 
the phrase "ye coast of Codde." The name of the Cape was 
given by Gosnold, and no one in this neighborhood ever called 
it anything else but " Cape Cod." The old Puritan minister 
was a scholar and, according to the standard of his day and 
generation, he knew how to spell, and never would have been 
guilty of the foolish orthography there used. Moreover the 
writer's subscription alone would be enough to condemn the 
letter. Mather had sins enough of his own to answer for 
without ascribing to him the crude absurdities of this forgery. 
In every community there is a certain number of persons 



AUG 



always ready to adopt opinions which are in accord with their 
.own feelings. The instances are frequent where evil-minded 

cjmen have thus played upon the credulity of the public and so 

,-;} started false reports and gross slanders. 

The letter has been reprinted so often, and I am called upon 
so frequently to answer questions concerning it, that I set 
about tracing the origin of the story to its source. After some 
correspondence I found that it was written by the late James F. 
Shunk, at one time editor of the Easton Argus, in the columns 
of which it originally appeared during his connection with the 
newspaper. He was a man of distinguished ancestry, — his 
two grandfathers having been governors of the Commonwealth 
of Pennsylvania, — but with a strong prejudice against the 
Puritans. The letter was written in a spirit of hostility to 
New England people ; and it was evidently the writer's inten- 
tion to throw discredit on them, and to a certain extent he was 
successful. Mr. Shunk, the author of the forgery, died in 
1874, at the age of thirty-six years. 



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